Mr. Speaker, there is absolutely no empirical evidence at all that the Wheat Board gets anything other than to pool our grain right now.
We believe that farmers need freedom. That is what I have promised them throughout my whole political career. That is what has been promised by so many members on this side of the House because it is critical to us. We believe that people should be able to make their own choices.
There are a couple of reasons why. One has to do with how the Wheat Board has spent the farmers' money over the last few years. Last year it held an election. I did not hear the member bring that up at any point and criticize it. Within the middle of the election campaign it refused, denied permission to the people who were running, to tell the farmers that it had spent somewhere between $60 million and $100 million on two ships.
This entity, that was supposed to be trading my grain and the grain of farmers across western Canada on its own, decided that it needed to spend somewhere around $100 million to go into the shipping business, which it was not trained nor set up to do. However, without consulting farmers, it decided it needed to do that.
I can provide other examples. For instance, there was the advertising campaign in the last few weeks. Maybe I will get to answer that in the next question, but it spent millions of dollars of farmers' money without talking to farmers about that.